03.31.07
Posted in 1. The Story at 9:52 am by Chef Matt
As a chef at a fine restaurant, I am able to create a huge array of different dishes with lots of creative spins and ideas associated with them. It is probably the best perk of the job, that I am allowed to flex my “creative muscle” in the kitchen to some degree.
A typical amuse bouche - small, flavorful and decorative. Why did they put ME in charge of that? |
For our most recent wine dinner for example, my boss gave me free reign over the amuse bouche - so long as it involved goat cheese in some way. (There is a full description of the creation of this dish and the final results on the other blog I write for: Eat Foo.) The dish was received well by both our guests and my bosses, which is all I could ask for in a situation like that. Creating a new dish from scratch and then immediately “testing” it on the public is absolutely nerve-wracking. But at the same time, it is probably the best of the many types of adrenaline rushes that this job produces. Especially when the resulting feedback is positive.
All is well and good when one chef gets to use the plate in front of them as a blank canvass. But what happens when more than one chef gets involved? Well, it can go one of two ways:
- They can agree on everything, and produce a dish together as if they are of one mind.
- There will be disagreements
Quick quiz: which of the two scenarios above do you think is WAY more common?
I ran out of scratch n’ sniff stickers… |
Pencils down. OK, so I am assuming you all guessed #2, and of course you are right. Congratulations. The gold star is suitable for printing and framing if you got it right. Indeed, there are differences when two chefs get together to put a dish together from scratch, and of course, this blog post is about just such an occasion.
Spring is upon us here in DC, so it is time to update our menu to reflect the changing of the season. More fresh green vegetables and light, herbed vinaigrettes, and less winter squashes with cream sauces. Even our beer menu is getting a tune-up as we move off some of the heavy stouts in favor of crisp lagers and ales. In accordance with that theme, one of the specials we are running as of late is a Niçoise salad with some nice touches like purple fingerling potatoes and white asparagus. The resulting colors on the plate are just fabulous.
But the devil is in the details, and there was a disagreement between myself and Jay as to the dressing. The description they had resulted in their wanting a sesame dressing on the salad - that is, they wanted to put a twist on it that gave it a sort-of Asian flavor to go with the sesame-crusted tuna that was to be placed on the salad. While I thought this was a neat idea, I didn’t know if we wanted to take a dish with such a French name (”Niçoise” - jeez - it even has a curly-cue coming down from the “c” for crying out loud!) and suddenly spin it half Chinese. I would have been more in favor of this idea if we had done a few more things Asian on the plate as well, like soba noodles in place of the bed of greens and maybe water chestnuts in place of the white asparagus. To me, this dressing just seemed out of place.
Additionally, there was a nice bunch of fresh tarragon leftover from the wine dinner where I made my chevre trio, and a fresh lemon-tarragon vinaigrette on this salad I think would have been wonderfully traditional, more appropriate, and downright delicious.
“Sesame dressing, and hold the plague of locusts…” |
But there is a hierarchy in a kitchen for a reason, and even though I am for all practical purposes the Garde Manger, which makes salads my domain, I am also subordinate to the Executive Chef, so his word is final. So let it be written. So let it be done.
The sesame dressing that I made came out quite nicely, and I was at least allowed to plate the salad mostly to my own specifications (so there was a little touch of my influence in there when all was said and done) and the result was quite good. I am not going to play the game of speculation as to which way would have been better, since that is counter-productive to what we are trying to accomplish in the kitchen.
The simple fact is that we are all on the same team, and trying to achieve the same goal. It is inevitable that there will be times when we disagree on the best way to get there. But at the end of the day, when the customers all go home happy and we are cleaning the kitchen, we can all be friends once again. After all, they’re just creative differences - they’re nothing personal.
Matt
Permalink
03.26.07
Posted in 2. Greatest Hits, 5. Rants and Raves at 6:45 pm by Chef Matt
I have done a lot of traveling in my days, and of course the thing I focus on most when I am visiting a new place is the local cuisine. It is from the observations I make of how people cook and combine flavors in different parts of the world that I feel I am able to become a better chef. And just to make this whole issue into a “chicken or egg” dilemma, it is perhaps these observations and experiences that led me to become a chef in the first place…
But I can’t help but think about how much better so many foods are in other countries I have been to. I know it is cliché and I may be beating a very dead horse here when I say this, but we Americans really just don’t do ourselves right by the food we eat. While I think the concept of the Great American Melting Pot is one that makes this country great, it leaves us with a sort-of garbled culinary tradition of our own. The result is often a lack of depth in the flavors that we are presented with, and an almost inarticulate sense of what constitutes a fine dining experience. So much of what we eat is shipped to us or grown in factory farms that the real joys of fresh meat and produce completely escape us, while our desire for fast and easy preparations don’t allow us the opportunities to see what cooking can really give to us if we just give it a little more time and effort.
Fresh off your own raspberry bush, there is almost nothing better. |
In fact it was just today my mom swung by my house, and I was showing her how my raspberry canes were flourishing nicely in my backyard. Since that means I am expecting a very large crop this year, she of course begged me for any “overflow” that I may have because the raspberries in the stores these days are devoid of flavor. They have been cross-bred so as to make mold-resistant varieties, but at the cost of flavor. Personally, this is not a trade-off that I think is worth it. Paying $3.99 for a pint of fresh, flavorless raspberries makes as little sense as paying the same amount for a pint of rich, rotten ones, so we might as well just take our chances, right?
How to cook a Caribbean lobster.
Step 1: Go out and catch it… |
When I was on a sailing voyage in the British Virgin Islands a few years ago, my uncle said that we had to swing by a place called “Sidney’s Peace and Love” for dinner one night. While I loved the name, I wasn’t sold on the concept until my uncle ordered dinner for us. On the radio from our ship. He radioed in the kinds of fish and lobster we wanted, and they were ready for us when we arrived later that night. They had gone out and caught the fish we ordered that morning, so it is hard to dispute the freshness of our meals! It was like this all over the islands, and the fish were truly some of the best I have ever had.
Being Italian, I have been to Italy several times, and I don’t think I need to convince anyone here of the freshness of Italian foods. Basil that was clipped seconds before being added to the pot and tomatoes so red that you’d think they were artificially colored were staple ingredients of the cooking I have both done and received in the land of my ancestors. And cheeses made from unpasteurized milk have a body and flavor that just cannot be matched by anything we have here in America with our pasteurization laws. There is a reason Italians grate fresh parmesan on almost all their pastas: Because they can.
The jamon in Jabugo was so good, we ordered another plate of it for dessert. No lie. |
When my family all got together to rent a villa in southern Spain one year, we weren’t only treated to the great culinary marvels of the area like jamon from Jabugo, amazingly light Manchego cheese and the best olives I have ever had in my life, but we were also treated to a collection of lemon, lime and orange trees on the property of the villa. Every morning we drank copious amounts of fresh orange juice and lemonade with breakfast, and every night we enjoyed salads and grilled vegetables with citrus vinaigrettes that just exploded with flavor. It was there that I came up with my first rough concepts of my lemon-lime vinaigrette that we now use frequently at Restaurant Vero.
All of these stories show a facet of what is wrong with food today in America.
- We place more emphasis on making sure the food can get to market rather than on the quality of the product that arrives there. So the fruit may be fresh, free of bugs, and every year is a bumper crop, but who wants a bumper crop of mediocrity?
- We have to make sure we have plenty of everything in stock so that we can get exactly what we want when we want it. The concept of the “catch of the day” is long in our past as we instead deplete the oceans to make sure we have too much of everything on hand so that any order can be fulfilled.
- Our collective fears of any sort of germ or bacteria ever coming in contact with our body has forced us to pass ridiculously extreme laws about how sterile our food must be, which destroys any strong flavor characteristics, and yet does little to address the real causes of food-borne illnesses. (Peter Pan peanut butter anyone?…)
- And lastly, why doesn’t anyone grow their own fruits, vegetables and herbs anymore? If sunlight is touching your property, you can grow your own fresh food! Yes, it is more work, but so is good cooking. I firmly believe that in order to truly call yourself a “foodie”, you must also work to flex your own green thumb.
How can this photo be a surprise to anyone?… |
I am certainly not the first to raise these issues and voice these complaints, nor do I hope I will be the last. This needs saying by as many people as possible who agree that we can do so much better with the food options we present ourselves with in this country. If we truly want to consider ourselves as the greatest nation, I think we have to first prove it by not being complacent when we are fed total garbage. If we work for, and demand the best, I think we will all be pleased with the collective culinary results.
In the meantime though, I think I am going to have to get myself a villa in Andalucía, Spain. You know, something near Jabugo of course…
Matt
Permalink
03.25.07
Posted in 1. The Story at 9:24 am by Chef Matt
One of my major misgivings when I considered becoming a chef was the fact that professional kitchens are usually very small. It is part of the deal of doing this professionally. Of course, working in cubicle-land was hardly what I would call “wide open space” but at least the space you have is yours. In a kitchen, space is tight, you share it with everyone else, and it is a guarantee there will be arguments over who gets to use what space and when.
The reasoning behind this space crunch for kitchen staff is quite simple, and actually makes some sense. All things being equal, the smaller the kitchen, the larger the dining room, and the larger the dining room, the more money you can take in within the space of a given night.
This might be enough space for me,
if I could bring a 6-burner range… |
But I am the kind of cook who like ROOM. I take up my whole kitchen (and then some) when I cook at home, and I usually dirty every dish twice in the process. As one of my chef instructors told me in culinary school, “If you’re going to use that many dishes, you better learn to apologize VERY convincingly in Spanish when you get out into the kitchens…” It has always been a struggle for me, but I have learned to work in the close quarters of a hot kitchen - even if I occasionally need to put an extra pan on someone else’s table…
In the wake of Restaurant Vero’s ever-expanding empire to conquer more space of the strip center we are located in, we have made our most recent grab of a small shop down at the other end of the line from us. We are using it for office space, which in turn has had a major effect on the restaurant and how we use the space there.
The already crowded office has now become extra storage for the catering supplies. The area that held catering supplies now is a wide open space for the wait staff to polish flatware and glasses. We also were able to move some of our food storage into the old office space, which means more space in the kitchen itself. And more space has this amazingly liberating feeling when it comes to cooking.
The only drawback to more floor space:
More to mop. |
But once the space opens in a kitchen, instantly the mind of a chef begins to think: “Wait - how can I use all this space I now have?” And that is where we are now. We feel it is time to re-organize where everything is located in the kitchen to improve traffic flow, use more space for prep activities, and of course, add some tables in to give us more work surfaces (which is what is always at a premium…)
What it all boils down to is that I have been given the gift of a much more spacious kitchen, but soon it will be taken away from me once again. At least I get some more tables to spread my dirty dishes on in exchange for my loss…
Matt
Permalink
03.18.07
Posted in 1. The Story at 4:15 pm by Chef Matt
Introductory Aside: This story actually happened some time ago, and I have intentionally been holding it for some time so that any affected parties would have had time to come to grips with any of the errors that come to light in the telling of this tale. Also it may have been enough time that nobody can tell exactly who this is about…
Working in a restaurant can be boiled down into two forms of job functions:
- Repetition of a set of actions that result in the creation of the dishes that are on the menu.
- Creative problem solving to compensate for times when Function #1 won’t work.
We might have still been able to use that cake off the floor if the dog hadn’t gotten to it… |
Many times, the problem solving is simple enough - like somebody wants to substitute sweet potatoes for mashed potatoes, or instead of blue cheese on a salad they want parmesan. Sometimes it gets a little trickier, like when someone sends their selection back since it wasn’t cooked right, or just isn’t what they wanted.
But I have found throughout my career that it is the catering side of things where creative problem solving skills really have to come into play. I have mentioned before how catering is like playing a constant “away” game for a sports team. You are always on unfamiliar ground, and not in your home base. If you find yourself lacking something you need, it is time to find a solution, and find it fast.
Which finally brings us to the story at hand.
With a large set of catering parties on hand, I have recently been tapped to make occasional deliveries before my shift starts. This day in question was like any other where I had to make a routine delivery to a regular client of ours. I looked over the menu, and started to load our van with the appropriate food trays and so forth. It was at this stage that problem one arose. Their tray of “jumbo cookies” was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, this one happened on our “home field”, so rectifying this by making a fruit tray on the fly, and adding two bowls of chocolate miniatures meant they would at least have some dessert for their buffet, which always seems to work.
I packed up the rest of the order, plus my standard bucket of tools and utensils, and headed out to the hotel where the party was happening. Upon arrival, I called the contact person on her cell phone, but she didn’t answer. I left a message, and waited for a few minutes. (The contacts for parties like this are usually quite harried themselves, so it is understandable if they can’t answer the phone right away…) I called again…and then again. Still nothing. Problem two was rearing its ugly head. So I called back to the restaurant to see if they had another contact number/person. Alas, they did not, but this call generated problem number three. Jay had found the bowl of Caesar salad dressing that I was supposed to have with me. I had missed it in the packing, perhaps when I was quickly throwing together the new dessert order.
So I now had a large salad with no dressing to be delivered to a person who didn’t seem to exist. Lovely.
But having been to culinary school and having taken hotel and restaurant management courses has taught me one thing: nice hotels usually have kitchens with round-the-clock staff on call in them. And kitchens have salad dressing in them. (I didn’t have to go to culinary school to learn the second part…) So I brought the food inside to the hotel and asked the manager if the kitchen was open, and if so, could they please spare some Caesar salad dressing?
For some reason people don’t seem to like the taste of anchovy first thing in the morning… |
“I’m sorry, the kitchen staff is gone for the day, but they only do breakfast, so even if they were here, I doubt they’d have any Caesar salad dressing.”
Shit.
Well, at least they could page the person who was my contact, right?… Yes, they could do that, but just as they were about to, my cell phone jumped to life - it was my contact returning my call. The delivery was to be made to the penthouse (which I knew, but I needed someone to let me in) and she had unlocked the door for me. But I couldn’t very well go up with no salad dressing.
I asked the manager if there was a convenience store nearby, and he informed me of a 7-11 two blocks away. While I didn’t relish the thought of a mad dash over there, I was still fully prepared to get in touch with my inner Jim Fixx when the manager stopped me in the middle of my stretching routine.
“If you like, I can send my doorman over there to pick up some dressing for you…”
He didn’t have to offer that to me twice! I pulled out a twenty and thanked the doorman profusely while asking him to pick up two bottles of Caesar salad dressing for me. Here is how my half of the conversation proceeded:
What I needed. |
“Thanks so much, I need two bottles of Caesar dressing…Two…Caesar…Yes…Two…Yes…Thank you…Caesar…Yes…Thank you so much.”
I headed up to the penthouse and began the set up of the dinner in the dining area of the penthouse. My contact was there to help out. This part was relatively routine as buffet arrangement is pretty standard stuff. And this table was small enough that it didn’t allow for too many permutations on the theme. The hot food was put in place and salads and dessert were laid down as well. Utensils and napkins were arranged for easy access, and all the trash (plastic wrap mainly) was piled together so I could take it with me. Nothing to it. All I had to do was light the Sterno cans to keep the hot food warm until dinner began, and we were good to go.
Do not play with Happy Sterno Can.
Do not taunt Happy Sterno Can.
If Happy Sterno Can begins to smoke, cover head and move away quickly. |
It was with great dismay that I realized that packing a lighter for this final t